The Haunting of Henry Twist

by Rebecca F. John

  ‘What I love most,’ she explains, ‘is being able to stop wherever you like.’ She flicks through the pages, then lets the cover fall shut and places the volume back on top of the pile. ‘You can go so far as the lovers declaring their love and then leave them, forever happy, forever wrapped up in each other. You don’t ever need to know that one abandoned the other, or that one died young and left the other alone.’

  ‘Who says one has to leave or die?’

  ‘One always does,’ she replies, sadness thick in her voice. ‘Otherwise, what would be the point of writing the book?’

  ‘But …’ Gray sits forward and scratches at his cheek. He needs a shave. ‘Don’t you want to know what happens?’

  ‘Not always,’ Sally says, and then, finally, she turns around. With only the sun to clothe her, she looks as peaceful and perfect as a Renaissance nude, and Grayson actually gasps.

  ‘You are incredible,’ he tells her.

  Sally lowers her head to hide her smile. ‘So are you,’ she whispers.

  An hour or so later, Grayson is called from bed by his rumbling stomach. As he fumbles around for his clothes, Sally speaks from between the rumpled sheets.

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Helen.’

  ‘Helen. Oh, haughty of course,’ Grayson answers with a laugh. ‘But that was just for show. When we were alone she was very quiet. Not shy, you know – just serious. And she was ambitious. God, she was a dreamer. Why do you want to know?’

  Sally shrugs.

  When she speaks again, he is fully clothed. ‘Grayson?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What did you imagine being, when you were a child?’

  He sits on the end of the bed to think this through. The mattress springs creak under his weight. ‘Honestly?’ he says eventually. ‘A father … What did you imagine being?’

  Sally crawls forward to kiss him, long and deep and more honest than he’s yet known her. ‘Needed,’ she murmurs.

  Gray kisses her again, to create some time for himself before asking the question he must next ask. He is not sure if the answer he is imagining is the one he wants, but something in his gut is telling him to carry on, utter the words: that is the only way he can find out.

  ‘And what about now?’ he says. ‘What do you want to be now?’

  Sally’s answer bounds back at him. ‘Yours,’ she says.

  Sybil Brown does not rise to meet them. They are invited inside by a door left partly open and the glow of candlelight through a small archway. The flat is dark notwithstanding the weather. Heavy curtains have been drawn across the two windows, and in this first reception room, there is only one small lamp to illuminate the way: it reveals little beyond the deep green colour of the carpet and a nearby vase of silk roses. Henry, Jack and Ida file towards the archway in silence. Libby too, balanced on Ida’s hip and perhaps discerning the mood, is quiet.

  ‘Miss Brown?’ Henry calls.

  A slightly husky, disembodied voice replies. ‘Yes. Come in, Mr Twist. You’re welcome.’

  They sneak, the odd three, through the archway – which has been knocked out crudely around an existing doorframe, Henry notices – and stop to assess the room. Ida stands between the two men and makes shushing noises at the baby, who has still not uttered a sound.

  Sybil sits at an undersized but obscenely ornate table. Square-topped and shining, its single leg has carved into it masses of unusual and grotesque creatures, each pushing and stumbling over the creature beneath in some desperate upwards scramble. On top of the table, a single candle lights Sybil’s face eerily from below, and Henry sees that she is younger than he had been expecting: perhaps around his own age. To welcome them, she unknits her fingers and spreads her hands, creating in the simple arrangement of flesh a single pale butterfly. It is only then, and because of the movement of her arms, that Henry notices her fudge-coloured hair, rippling, as though shivering with cold, all the way to the floor and then some inches further. She wears it like a cloak. Beneath that, she has on a plain black dress and, combined with the intense shadows in the room, the latter makes her body almost indistinguishable.

  She is, Henry thinks, acting the part expected of her. He reserves his judgement, though, as to whether that is for their benefit or her own.

  ‘Please,’ she rasps. ‘Sit.’

  There is a chaise longue set before the table, the green material just light enough to avoid clashing with the carpet. Henry, Jack and Ida sidestep along the length of it. If nothing else, Sybil Brown has a certain command over people: they are obeying her with a silent mechanism. At the nod of her head, they sit in unison, making the candles lined up along the walls flicker.

  Henry squints into the darkness beyond Sybil, looking for the detail; any detail which might make him believe she can be trusted. There is nothing much in the small cubic space but a narrow bookcase, filled with glasses and jugs and vases of the same silk roses he saw in the reception room.

  Beside him, Jack coughs into his fist.

  ‘So,’ Sybil begins. ‘Who are we looking to speak with today?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you know that?’ Henry replies quietly. ‘Either she’s here or she’s not. That’s how it works, isn’t it?’

  ‘Henry,’ Ida warns, putting a hand gently to his knee.

  ‘Don’t fret, Miss,’ Sybil says, opening her palms again and launching that pale butterfly into lazy flight. ‘Let him speak freely. She was your wife then, Mr Twist?’

  ‘Yes.’ Henry pushes his left-hand knuckles across his forehead, leaving red tramlines on the skin there. He is starting to perspire.

  Sybil considers Libby, her eyes moving baldly over the child. ‘And she was taken suddenly.’

  Henry’s head hangs lower. He breathes loud between the grill of his fingers. Jack touches his back: as though, Ida thinks, he is guiding a woman through a doorway.

  ‘Yes,’ Ida answers.

  ‘But not on account of the child?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there … Can you see anyone?’ Jack asks, his voice too loud. He is either scared or impatient – Henry suspects that even Jack could not say for sure which. ‘Can you hear her?’

  ‘No,’ Sybil replies.

  ‘Then how did you …?’

  ‘I am simply ascertaining the facts, Mr Turner. These things are apparent on the faces of the people sitting before me. They –’ she indicates Henry and Ida, ‘– are mourning this woman, this … Ruth. No, Ruby. That’s it. Ruby.’

  ‘That’s right!’ Ida nods.

  Sybil hums, as though she is agreeing to some solemn pact, before falling silent. She closes her eyes, but she does not affect the twitching and shaking Henry is expecting. She does not roll her eyes or mutter inaudibly. It is as though she has just settled down to sleep.

  Ruby was never an easy sleeper. She found the state effortlessly enough, yes, but once there, she would turn about and about, legs kicking, arms thrashing. Sometimes, caught unawares, Henry would receive a significant blow and half-wake thinking himself caught again in the clinging depths of French or Belgian mud, sinking, sinking forever downwards, until it was possible he might just break through the earth and plummet into hell itself. The only sweet relief during those moments was that the sky – pink and warm as a blush, or a far-off flat blue, or even a blasted mess of buckled steel-grey – was still visible above him. What fully woke him each time, though, was not the mud or the bodily panic or the desperation for a glimpse of the sky, but the fact that he had promised his father he would not fight this war. He had offered the old man hope. Hope that theirs was a bond which could be rebuilt. Hope that Henry would live to do the rebuilding.

  With each gasp into consciousness, he would find Ruby somehow already leaning over him, her hand pressed to his heart, her lips mouthing words he could not hear but which he now decides he must have been able to decipher all along. Let it fade, Henry. It’s just an echo. Let it fade.

  The great fear now, of
course, is that it is she who will fade.

  ‘Let it fade,’ Sybil whispers. ‘Let it fade.’

  Henry does not react to the words. He thinks them within his own mind still, because inside the private black blink of his eyes, he is lying on cold sand with his wife – the one time they went to the beach together – and he is waking again from nightmares. He is waking to a sky sliced through with shards of icy pink; he is waking to the always-surprising fact that he survived it, he is alive while Bingley is not; he is waking to Ruby.

  They had walked every grain of the beach that evening, then stayed in a little B&B on the front and done the same the next day, exchanging plans with every rolling slosh of the seal-coloured sea. Ruby possessed some vague idea that they would travel Europe, visiting – though she didn’t actually say as much – all those places Henry had once fought his way across. They both knew they would never afford it, but Henry appreciated her need to share in the locations he had suffered through. He showed her his appreciation with his body, there on the beach, hidden by nothing but the temperatures which were keeping everyone else away, which were persuading every other fool to rush indoors, to light fires, to envelop themselves in layers of wool, to waste their winter evening in the pursuit of simple, unsatisfying heat.

  Henry felt then that he had been gifted some knowledge the rest of the world had failed to acquire.

  ‘I feel,’ he’d mouthed into Ruby’s neck, ‘like the wisest man in the world.’

  ‘You are the wisest man in the world,’ she answered. ‘That’s why I chose you.’

  They unwound onto the sand, turning their faces to the brightening moon.

  ‘You didn’t choose me,’ Henry said. ‘I chose you.’

  And Ruby had laughed at that. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you didn’t.’ And, of course, she was right.

  Sybil speaks again, more clearly, yanking Henry out of his daydream. ‘It’s just an echo,’ she says. ‘Let it fade.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Henry stands, and four heads follow his movement.

  Sybil’s eyes flutter open. ‘Only what I could hear. Does it mean something to you, Henry?’

  ‘It’s what I’d been thinking.’

  ‘Exactly what you were thinking?’ Jack enquires.

  ‘Exactly,’ Henry confirms.

  ‘Then I’m sorry,’ Sybil says, standing to catch his eye. She is, he notices, quite tall, though nowhere near his equal.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s all I could hear,’ she explains. ‘Your wife is not here.’

  ‘You know that?’ Ida says. ‘So quickly? Don’t you need a little more time?’

  Sybil lowers herself back into her chair and motions for Henry to do the same. Again he obeys. Once he is seated, Sybil puffs out the candle between them, turning her face to grey.

  ‘To a certain extent, I give people what they expect when they visit me,’ she says, demonstrating the room with her hands. ‘But if I don’t hear anything, I don’t report anything. No amount of money could entice me to lie. Especially to a friend of Montague’s.’

  ‘But you …’ Henry cannot bring himself to say, ‘read my mind’. He leaves the words suspended in the air. Sybil, it seems, will hear them if she wants to.

  Sybil smiles. ‘It’s a gift,’ she says. ‘So, you doubted me, Mr Twist.’

  ‘I did,’ Henry replies, smiling slightly in return.

  ‘And have I persuaded you that you were wrong to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why not just ask me what it is you want to know?’

  He almost pauses to consider his question, but then he thinks better of it and pushes on. He knows what he must ask. He has been asking it of himself for months now.

  ‘I want to know if it’s possible for her to be trapped. No, not trapped. Caught, voluntarily, in someone … inside … Could she be using someone else’s body?’ he blurts.

  ‘Using?’ Sybil replies. ‘What for?’

  ‘To stay. With me.’

  Sybil takes a moment to ponder her answer. She leans back in her chair. She knots and unknots her fingers.

  ‘There is a belief, amongst some, that certain souls, however many times they might visit Earth, are meant to be together. That they will find each other, so to speak, regardless of distance or age or –’ she flicks her eyes at Jack, ‘– gender. Linked souls, you might call them.’

  ‘A belief amongst some?’ Ida asks, frowning.

  Sybil nods.

  ‘And are you one of those some?’ Ida pushes.

  Sybil sighs. ‘I’m not one to observe rules or beliefs,’ she says. ‘I hear what I hear, and I share it with people. That’s all. I’m no philosopher.’ The sentence ends uncomfortably. They all hear the ‘but’. Eventually, Sybil continues. ‘But it is a theory most practitioners would subscribe to. It is said that a soul might return, through many different channels, to help a soul they are linked with.’

  ‘And then what?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Then,’ Sybil shrugs, making her hair shimmer. ‘Who knows, Jack? You tell me.’

  Henry does not miss the wink. He does not react to it, either. He does not feel capable of an awful lot at this particular moment, except nostalgia. Who would have thought a year ago that he would be sitting in this shabby flat, his wife’s sister and his daughter to his right, a man he could call his lover to his left, and a pale-skinned psychic medium directly in front of him? Ruby would laugh at his desperation to find her. Laugh, or cry – Ruby Twist was afraid of neither. Henry is perhaps afraid of both.

  ‘Do you suggest we come back?’ Ida is asking now. ‘I mean, might it be different, at another time maybe?’

  Sybil shakes her head slowly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t be,’ Henry says and, standing again, he extends a hand to her. Jack and Ida, taken aback by how readily he has accepted Sybil’s failure, slowly mirror his movement, and Henry nods encouragement at them. The meeting is over. Ruby, as she was – young and Welsh and abundant and female – is not here. And that, he has only just realised, is exactly what he wanted Sybil to say. Of course Ruby’s spirit is not here. How could it be? Hasn’t Henry known all along that it only journeyed so far as the next available body?

  All he has to do now is find a way to prove it. Surely, there are others with gifts similar to Sybil’s. He could consult them, too. He just needs to keep asking questions. Eventually, someone will give him the answer he wants.

  ‘Can I ask about the roses?’ Henry asks as he and Sybil shake.

  ‘The roses?’

  ‘They’re all silk,’ Henry explains. ‘I was wondering why they’re all silk. Why not get some living flowers in?’

  Sybil nods as she answers, her lips just considering a smile. ‘It’s as you think, Mr Twist,’ she says. ‘It’s because living flowers die.’

  It is a surprise to find the sun still shining when they step back through Sybil’s darkened flat, down a flight of wide fauxmarble steps, and out through a pair of light wooden doors into the day. It is a surprise that the city is still there, ploughing onwards, when they have been so cocooned – for such a short time, though it feels like hours – within that quiet, womb-like flat; just them, a medium, and all the spirit world.

  They bunch together on the pavement, not knowing what to do next. A Dalmatian on a lead pauses to sniff at Jack’s trouser leg before being coaxed away by its tolerant master.

  ‘Well,’ Ida says through a long exhalation.

  ‘Well,’ Jack answers.

  ‘What now, then?’

  Jack grins and slips his arm into Ida’s, as though they are the best of friends. ‘I for one could do with another slice of pineapple cake,’ he says. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Why not,’ Henry answers. ‘Why the hell not?’

  A BIRTH and a STRIKE

  In the very first minutes of May the 4th, 1926, Britain’s blood stops flowing. The Tubes stop rattling, trams stop screeching, bus wheels stop turning, cars crowd themselves i
nto stillness, and with a creak and a splutter, every man and woman in London is stranded. The Trades Union Congress demands strike action and its members take to the streets, determined, in not doing their jobs, to save them. The country, without its transport, regresses to a time when nights were silent and the sky was black. And Henry and Jack lie shoulder to shoulder in bed, enjoying a morning which they have begun, not separated by crowded city miles, but together.

  Just that. Together.

  Ida left for Wales the same day King George welcomed his granddaughter, Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth of York, into the world, and, though they knew this child would never rule their great country, the nation was briefly buoyed on the 21st of April. It was, for millions, a happy day. For Henry, it was a day of pure relief.

  At Paddington, Ida, pushed up onto her tiptoes, had kissed first Henry and then Jack on their cheeks before boarding her train. Then, hanging from the window, she’d grinned and instructed them to ‘be good daddies’. Since, they have received a letter. Dear H and J, it reads. An interesting trip which I hope to soon repeat. I could not be more convinced of the health and happiness of my niece – though I have been forced to promise my parents that you, H, will bring her to visit us soon, which may not do much for your health or happiness. What if I baked you a pineapple upside-down cake, J? Could you help persuade him then? With affection.

  Despite the easy tone of her correspondence, she still could not resist the formal, Sincerely, Ida Fairclough to end. This had amused Henry.

  Now, he is composing a letter of his own, scratching his awkward hand into Ruby’s fine writing paper.

  It is time, he informs his sister-in-law, for them to give up the flat. The money is running out. He and Jack have spoken to Monty and the old man has agreed to put them up, temporarily at least. Henry relays his news this simply, painting an easy picture for Ida. He does not mention that he doesn’t even know where Monty’s home is exactly, or that Monty made his offer drunkenly and may have forgotten it yet, or that he is fairly sure Matilda has lost her mind. He writes only cheerful words. Then he folds the page into an envelope and throws it onto Ruby’s dressing table.